Yale scholar finds rare art of ‘line singing'

Listen to line singing by members of Thewarlee Indian Baptist Church

By Judy Gibbs Robinson

Staff Writer

At a little backwoods church in Oklahoma, a Yale University musicologist was surprised to discover Muscogee (Creek) Indians singing a nearly obsolete style of worship service. Called "line singing,” the musical church service originated in Scotland in the 1600s, came to the United States with Scottish immigrants and was picked up by black slaves.

It consists of one person singing a line of Psalms, which the rest of the congregation then repeats, adding their own harmonies.

Until the Creek church service two years ago, Yale scholar Willie Ruff thought the history ended with a few surviving pockets of line-singing churches among Scottish descendants in Appalachia and blacks in Alabama.

The American Indians added a whole new twist — linking white, black and red in the New World to Scottish Highlanders in the Old World.

"It spans the arc of American music history,” said Hugh Foley, a music professor at Rogers State University in Claremore, who connected Ruff to the Muscogee (Creek) churches.

International conference

All three groups — black, white and American Indian — will demonstrate their versions today and Friday at the second international conference on line singing at Yale. Twenty-two members of several rural Oklahoma churches will share the conference stage with members of the Indian Bottom Old Regular Baptist Association from southeast Kentucky and the Sipsey River Primitive Baptist Association from Alabama.

"This is one of those things that maybe once in a lifetime comes up,” said Eugene Harjo, pastor of Hutchee Chuppa Indian Baptist Church in rural Okfuskee County. Until Ruff expressed interest, "it was just a Creek thing. That's what I thought,” Harjo said.

Scholars of music, sociology, political science and history also will weigh in. Katherine Smith of Dundee University in Scotland will talk about early Scottish missionaries who brought line singing along with Christianity to the Creeks in their pre-removal homelands in Georgia, Florida and Alabama. Foley will talk about the content and form of Creek hymns.

Yale also hosted the first line-singing conference in 2005, when Ruff was unaware of the Indian connection.

His first clue came in an e-mail from Jane Bardis, a Muscogee (Creek) woman from Tulsa. She had heard a radio story about the conference and wanted to know why the Creeks were not invited because they, too, did line singing.

A week later, Ruff flew to Oklahoma to investigate and found himself listening to the traditional Scottish service sung in Creek at the Hutchee Chuppa church.

"Of course the language is different. What is alike, really, is the passion and the deep commitment to this form of worship,” Ruff said.

Foley, a jazz scholar, believes the Creek version of line singing represents a unique place in American history.

"It is one of the earliest — maybe the earliest — truly American music because it's a synthesis of all three — Anglo, African and American Indian,” he said.

Except for the enclaves Ruff has discovered, line singing died out as hymn books and organized choirs grew, beginning in the 19th century.

"It's really almost extinct everywhere. We may not be able to save it, but we can give it one hell of a funeral,” Ruff said.

"This is one of those things that maybe once in a lifetime comes up. It was just a Creek thing. That's what I thought.”

Eugene Harjo, pastor of Hutchee Chuppa Indian Baptist Church in rural Okfuskee County